From Stage to Stream: ‘Little Shop of Horrors’ Goes From An Off-Broadway Gem To A Sweet And Funny Movie Musical

Movie musicals are a unique genre in that they are often adaptations of another medium: the stage musical. It’s a tricky transition from stage to film, which is why movie musicals are often unwieldy ventures — often subject to an audience that’s ambivalent toward the genre as well as a rabid Broadway fan base who want to see their beloved stage productions get a faithful treatment on film. Writer and performer Ben Rimalower takes a look at how these musicals fare on film — this week tackling Frank Oz‘s 1986 adaptation of Little Shop of Horrors.

Little Shop of Horrors is one of the best and most successful stage musicals of the last 50 years or so. It can perhaps be best contextualized as a link in the lineage from Bye Bye Birdie (1960) and Grease (1972)to Hairspray (2002)and Avenue Q (2003). Like those other shows, Little Shop uses accessibly tuneful music and conversational lyrics (in this case, by Alan Menken and Howard Ashman) to make its characters more relatable and sympathetic. Unlike those other shows, the original 1982 production of Little Shop, while a record-breaking smash, never made it to Broadway. The scrappy milieu of Little Shop’s original Off-Broadway production was part of its charm. That Frank Oz’s 1986 film is so good is at least as much to the credit of screenwriter Howard Ashman as it is to Oz.

The late, great Howard Ashman (who was lost to AIDS in 1991 in the midst of his career taking off as the lyricist of Walt Disney’s The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin) not only wrote the lyrics but also the book and provided the direction for the original stage production. He knew the material well, and he wisely stayed close to his stage script, making only occasional changes to accommodate the switch in mediums for the movie. For the most part, the action proceeds moment-to-moment as it did Off-Broadway with quick, economical scenes niftily setting up enormously pleasing musical numbers, which more than carry their share of storytelling burden. It’s incredibly satisfying to watch any movie where 20, 30, 80 minutes go by without a wasted second of screentime, the plot unfolding deliciously one step ahead of expectations. In a musical, this is a miracle.

Director Oz made all the right decisions in terms of scaling the “world of the show” for the camera. On stage, there were only eight actors, including one unseen, who provided the voice of carnivorous plant Audrey II. In the movie, the scenes are opened up — a little bit. We see more than just the portion of the block occupied by Mushnik’s floral shop, but not much! And while there are more people on the street than just the three principals, a Greek chorus of girl-group singing urchins and one other guy, there’s still not much of a crowd. The result is that the show’s small-timey vibe is preserved. The story takes place on Skid Row in New York, but there’s a neighborhood-y, almost small-town feeling. Kind of like Sesame Street, but with monstrous puppets and sadomasochism.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xPq6W1EoIc]

The presentational device of the aforementioned urchins (Crystal, Ronette, and Chiffon) addressing the audience to comment on the action and tie up loose exposition was a risk to replicate on film, but it pays off handsomely. Rather than feeling stagey and off-putting, the familiar trope of a trio of attractive young black women harmonizing in 1960s style songs pulls the audience right into the scene on screen. This is particularly significant for people unaccustomed to watching musicals. We expect groups like The Supremes (and, in fact, The Crystals, The Ronettes, and The Chiffons) to sing storytelling songs. This eases the leap into watching the rest of the (non-narrator) characters express themselves through song in their own plots and in real-time. The movie’s opening sequence of the urchins singing the title song to the camera sets them up to bridge this cognitive gap right at the top.

In general throughout the film, it’s clear that Oz and Ashman took nothing for granted. They knew they were making a movie musical in an era when precious few were made and virtually none found an audience. They addressed each and every choice in bringing Little Shop to the screen with conscientious deliberation — how to make this work in this new context? The choreography (by Pat Garrett) stays true to the movement real people would exhibit in the given real situations, only zhuzhed up a little bit and set to the rhythm of the music. Probably the biggest challenge in this respect was staging the second song, “Skid Row (Downtown),” a showstopper on stage that had real potential to lay egg in the movie. The excitement of seven people gradually congregating front and center to belt out gloriously poppy music can be staggering on stage. On screen, maybe not so much. The movie, though, managed to get it just right. There is just the right amount of people, enough to be form a formidable street scene, but not too many where the moment gets out of proportion with the intimacy of the story. They are singing and dancing, but in the established minimalistic, believable style. It’s reminiscent of John Landis’ contemporaneous video for Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” and noteworthy as evidence that the right kind of musical theatre can appeal to the MTV generation.

No doubt, part of the movie’s appeal at the time of its release and in the years immediately following, when it was a major success on home video, is its cast, made up of many familiar faces to a non-musical theatre-loving audience. The lead role of Seymour is played by Rick Moranis, who, in addition to nailing the nerdiness of the character, also brings a surprisingly sweet and agile voice to the songs. The role of Orin Scrivello, D.D.S., essentially a cameo on stage and only slightly expanded for the movie, is rendered forever unbeatable by Steve Martin, given a showcase for many of his myriad gifts. In other supporting roles, popular funny men like Bill Murray, John Candy, James Belushi and Christopher Guest get their laughs. Character actor Vincent Gardenia is perfect as Mushnik. And a familiar voice is used memorably, as Audrey II is vocalized by the legendary Levi Stubbs of The Four Tops.

To quote the lyrics, “And then there’s Audrey, lovely Audrey.” The filmmakers only chose one member of the original cast to appear in the movie, and they chose wisely — perhaps the most important stage musical role recreation on film since Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl.Ellen Greene’s Audrey is one of the great musical theatre performances of her generation, up there with Patti LuPone in Evita and Jennifer Holliday in Dreamgirls— neither of whom got to reprise their role on screen. To call Greene’s Audrey iconic is almost beside the point. Yes, her signature breathy, Brechtian bimbo voice (buttressed by a soulful contralto rock belt) has left an indelible stamp on the songs from Little Shop. Even when you hear someone else sing Audrey, you can’t help but hear Greene’s bizarre combination of Carol Channing, Janis Joplin, and Lotte Lenya. The movie proves, however, that there’s more to her Audrey than meets the ear. Although she delivers one of the more over-the-top characterizations in a work that already teeters on the line of camp, she also provides irrefutable heart. From her first entrance, legs first, just boobs, and then a black eye, Greene exudes a pathos and childlike innocence that make you want to hold her and protect her. All of Seymour’s killing seems less horrendous because wouldn’t we do it for Audrey if we were in his shoes? Greene commands an emotional investment that keeps the proceedings far from the realm of mere kitsch. (As a side note, I recently had the pleasure of seeing Ellen Greene — now 64! — play Audrey once again in a semi-staged New York concert of Little Shop, opposite Jake Gyllenhaal as Seymour. Not only did she look and sound incredibly the same, her depth and power were even more moving.)

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIvpOIUqKKA]

This inevitable compassion for its characters, which the movie stirs in its audience, actually caused a problem for the studio on the eve of release. The original ending of the movie mirrored the stage script, in which Audrey II ultimately eats both Seymour and Audrey, the whole cast reconvening to sing the posthumous polemic “Don’t Feed The Plants.” This final sequence was given an elaborate production, in a winking homage to the Godzilla-era monster mayhem epics, achieved impressively without the use of CGI! Apparently, test audiences loathed it. Conventional wisdom was that it had worked in the theatre where the audience sees their heroes come out to take a bow after the death scene. Without a curtain call at the end of the film, and particularly after the camera made love to Ellen Greene in close-up, such a demise is unbearably tragic. A new ending was reshot, with Seymour and Audrey blowing up Audrey II and escaping to the country, a duplicate of the set from her fantasy sequence in “Somewhere That’s Green.” As a nod to the darker original, the final image of the movie is a baby “Audrey II” sprouting in the couple’s garden and flashing the camera a shit-eating grin. (For curious fans, the original ending, eventually included with the Blu-Ray release, can be seen on YouTube with Oz’s commentary.)

It all works, but still the single greatest asset is the Menken-Ashman score. Menken’s melodies are extremely memorable and evocative without being derivative. Ashman had a knack for knowing exactly when and why a song should happen, and what the hook of the lyrics should be. His words are always easily intelligible on the first hearing — an impressive and valuable feat in musicals.

There aren’t many modern musicals as good as Little Shop of Horrors and we are mighty lucky this one was preserved on film so well.